A methodology to evaluate standards and platforms within cyber threat intelligence

Abstract

The cyber security landscape is fundamentally changing over the past years. While technology is evolving and new sophisticated applications are being developed, a new threat scenario is emerging in alarming proportions. Sophisticated threats with multi-vectored, multi-staged and polymorphic characteristics are performing complex attacks, making the processes of detection and mitigation far more complicated. Thus, organizations were encouraged to change their traditional defense models and to use and to develop new systems with a proactive approach. Such changes are necessary because the old approaches are not effective anymore to detect advanced attacks. Also, the organizations are encouraged to develop the ability to respond to incidents in real-time using complex threat intelligence platforms. However, since the field is growing rapidly, today Cyber Threat Intelligence concept lacks a consistent definition and a heterogeneous market has emerged, including diverse systems and tools, with different capabilities and goals. This work aims to provide a comprehensive evaluation methodology of threat intelligence standards and cyber threat intelligence platforms. The proposed methodology is based on the selection of the most relevant candidates to establish the evaluation criteria. In addition, this work studies the Cyber Threat Intelligence ecosystem and Threat Intelligence standards and platforms existing in state-of-the-art.